As Data Breaches Soar, C-Suite Looks to Customer Data Management

Forbes

16-07-2025

Customer data management (CDM) best practices have never been more crucial to today's brands as they face escalating data breaches, which come with severe brand trust, balance-sheet, and customer retention issues. Throw rising competition, increased customer expectations, and a growing need for improved decision-making into the mix, and the need for strong CDM practices makes its own case.
Companies need to move, store, and analyze party data so that they can effectively target customers and offer deep personalization.
Most importantly, data security is especially critical to brands and businesses today – a data breach can cost companies millions within moments and break customer trust for a lifetime.
The complication of data breaches create a heightened demand for corporate accountability related to data security
Customers are expected to hand over their data today in most interactions with brands and businesses, but consumer frustrations are mounting as more and more data breaches and hacks occur. The calls for accountability are coming from both the consumers, as well as legislators, with good reason.
For many businesses, manual data-gathering efforts using Excel spreadsheets work—up to a point. As the company grows, however, so does the data and the need to make sense of it. This can quickly become unwieldy and unhelpful: Organizations can easily get lost and overwhelmed in large data sets and lose out on potentially valuable insights that help them stand out to their customers and improve the customer journey.
That's when it's time for a big change—enter customer data management strategies and solutions.
Winding path-to-purchase requires deep customer understanding
Unlike past decades, when channels were separate and siloed, today's path-to-purchase is a long and winding road. Multiple touchpoints, both online and off, need to stay connected— including email, CRM, e-commerce, social media, and retail POS.
That means it's essential for organizations to deeply understand the customer at every stage. Customer loyalty will soon depend on a company's willingness to protect customer information with the same fervor they pursue revenue.
Making sense of the data allows customers to be valued more
A range of cloud-based solutions are now commonly used for customer data management that serves as the centralized, beating heart of the effort to improve customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention; improve customer visibility and targeted communication, and boost data quality.
Ultimately, businesses need customer data management to work towards achieving a single customer view that allows them to provide the seamless customer experience that consumers have come to expect, as well as calculate important metrics such as the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
However, it's not just about the technology: It's about the strategies, policies, and actions that make customer data management an effective effort that helps drive growth.
Customer data management best practices: 7 important points brands should consider
Following are seven best practices for customer data management:
Data needs to be managed with internal standards and policies, to ensure that the organization handles data assets properly throughout the data lifecycle. Make sure the entire company is aligned, across the board, in terms of what data is collected, data points, and how it will be tracked and used.
Data protection regulations, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are on the rise. The right customer data management platform should make compliance with customer data regulations easy and straightforward.
It's important to determine what specific types of data are most effective to serve your customers and achieve your marketing goals. There are a variety of data categories and industry-specific data to consider, from your customer's identity data, loyalty program information, and online transactional data to demographic information, social media data, and qualitative data about attitudes and opinions.
Not only are data leaks and breaches becoming more costly every year—the average cost of a data breach in 2024 was $4.9 million—but these events can also severely impact a company's reputation, as well as its bottom line. If you aren't steering the security ship and communicating your commitment, you run the risk of falling into consumer doubt. After all, customers want to know their information is safe. It's essential to choose a customer data management platform that has the right security standards and practices in place.
According to an IBM report, 83% of companies suffer from data inaccuracy. Not only is outdated, inaccurate data not useful, but customer satisfaction and decision-making may suffer and lead to rising costs. The key to good customer data management is making sure customer data is regularly cleaned: That is, validating and updating information including email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses, as well as removing duplicates and deleting unnecessary contacts.
Forbes noted that companies now house an average of 15 silos of customer data. It doesn't have to be that way: Don't allow useful data such as call-center information, sales leads, emails, or finance communication to become useless, trapped in department and technology silos. Data needs to be securely shared and accessible, in ways that promote collaboration, problem-solving, and improved decision-making.
A complete, omnichannel customer journey includes customer profiles filled out with profile, activity, event, demographic and behavioral data, as well as data related to intent and perception. Getting to that goal requires robust end-to-end customer data management solutions that are highly scalable and can store billions of profile and consent records.
It's not enough to have customer data or even a holistic profile. Identity data must be collected and managed appropriately throughout the entire customer lifecycle. That means providing a frictionless customer experience with flexible registration, secure interaction touchpoints, and simplified authentication based on real-time, data-driven insights.
The future of customer data is bright—and unified
Today's buyers are in control. With a quick click or swipe, they can abandon a brand and make a quick move to the competition, or they can remain long-term loyalists.
That means customers —their wants, their needs, their preferences, their expectations—need to be at the heart of every business. Companies have to understand how to gather and analyze the right data in order to collect insights that help them deliver meaningful, seamless experiences to their buyers.
This is the promise and power of customer data management best practices: With the right platform that integrates with a company's existing sales and marketing technologies, customer data management helps brands deeply understand their customers through a holistic, unified, centralized, real-time view of data.
But organizations also need to follow best practices and prioritize successful strategies in order to make customer data management successful.
Effective data management is a promise to customers and an investment in your future. The first step is deciding to take control. You can do that today.
This post was first published on The Future of Commerce and is republished here with permission.